Inventor Nesting materials with a grain direction

[rath7v]

Hello,

A great addition\feature to the Inventor Nesting add-in would be the ability to nest parts that have a material grain direction (like solid wood cabinet doors) so that the grain will always be in line with the grain of the sheet (packaging). 

The grain direction could be taken straight from the actual material texture. And you would also specify the grain of the sheet (either in X or Y).

It would be a game changer for everyone in the woodworking industry indeed. 

We are seriously considering fully switching to Inventor for our business and this feature would be a massive advantage over our current MCAD software.

Regards,

Vern

[phillip.doup]

Hello @rath7v ,

Inventor Nesting should already support what you want. In the material library, you can specify the orientation on the material considered to be the grain direction: 

In most cases, this would be zero or 90 degrees, and indicates what orientation the grain is in when mounted on the machine. Note that the "Orientation adjustments" control what rotations the nesting engine is allowed to do. So, for instance, if you only want the wood grain along a certain direction on parts, you can uncheck the "Rotate 90" and "Rotate 270", which causes it to only rotate 180 degrees, keeping the part aligned to the grain. 

Then, on a part-by-part basis, you can control the orientation of the grain relative to the part. 

This orientation specifies the orientation of the grain relative to the part itself. The orientation of the material grain and the orientation of the part relative to the material grain are both used to determine the 0-degree orientation of the part. The Orientation adjustment options then allow nesting to rotate further from that orientation as allowed. Also note that these properties on a per-shape basis allow you to override the orientation adjustments on the material, if a particular shape's orientation relative to the grain doesn't matter.

I hope this helps.

[rath7v]

Hi Phillip,
Thank you very much for the reply! So the actual grain direction you set on a part from Inventors normal material library can affect the actual orientation when in Inventor Nesting you mean right?

Regards,
Vern

[rath7v]

Hi Phillip,
Thank you very much for the reply! So the actual grain direction you set on a part from Inventors normal material library can affect the actual orientation when in Inventor Nesting you mean right?

Regards,
Vern

[phillip.doup]

Hello @rath7v ,

Sorry for the late response.

To answer your question, we do not use the orientation from Inventor's material. The orientations we use are what are defined on the nesting material and the shapes.

[rath7v]

No worries! Ok. Thank you for letting me know! I’ve learned a lot from using it and really like how well it works though.

Vern